One of the courses we are required to take in my grad program is a Workshop, where we learn a basic variety of media production skills to supplement all our book-learnin’.

So far, we’ve done some work in Processing, creating computational art (which I will put up here once I get it working on my new computer), made a personal page in html (you’re on it), and for our most recent project, we worked as a class to make an online version of a book.

The book chosen for us was Des Imagistes, a collection of imagist poems edited by Ezra Pound that rarely circulates, and wasn’t online! We made a pretty neat online version that just we just finished up this morning. So check it out, and read some poems!

(My favorites are the short images from Allen Upward.)

After posting up that wordle visualization of my senior thesis, I decided to take a look back through the archives to see what other interesting things I could unearth. Reading one’s own college essays is an experience in humor and embarrassment that I could not just keep to myself. Of course, it wouldn’t be fair to you to put up the actual essays, so instead I’ve collected their titles, my recollections, and some visuals courtesy of Wordle for your amusement. Enjoy after the jump.

Brief explanation for my truancy: A little bit of HTML burnout, mixed with a week of parental visits, tossed with some time-consuming work on long-term projects resulted in my both not having anything to post and not having any time to post. Parents have left, HTML is fun again, and the projects have some more momentum now, so I’m back!

I am in the middle of a few books at the moment: The Meme Machine, by Susan Blackmore, The Producer as Composer, by Virgil Moorefield, and Live 7 Power!, by Jon Margulies.

Live 7 Power!

Live 7 Power! is one of those “unofficial manual”/”hidden guide” books to my music-making program of choice. I’ve been using the program for a few years, but there are a crazy number of features that I never use and wouldn’t even know how to use, hence reading this book.

The Producer as Composer

I picked this up when I dropped by the MIT Press bookstore. It’s a mostly academic survey of how the roles of music producer and musician have grown closer to each other, and often combined entirely. Ever since I read Brian Eno’s “The Studio as a Compositional Tool,” I’ve been interested in this kind of stuff; especially how for the current generation of bedroom recording artists, being both producer and musician is a given. The book also has great little descriptions of seminal recordings from a production standpoint, so you can focus on the details in “Be My Baby” or “Good Vibrations” that you might normally miss. I have absolutely no sense of production values, eq, etc., so I’m hoping this will encourage me to figure out how to shape my sound better in the future (maybe with the new tricks I pick up from Live 7 Power!

The Meme Machine

Since I’m going into what is essentially technologically-aided cultural studies, I want to read up on theories I find interesting and see if there is anything there for me to use academically. The Meme Machine takes the idea of memes, which people on the internet tend to use colloquially and pushes it to its logical limits. The basic thesis is that in the mind, analogous to genes in cells, are memes. Memes are essentially ideas that reproduce themselves (via language or other forms of imitation) in ways that are similar in many ways to genes. The book goes on to survey various features of genes and evaluate their possible analogues in memes. Included are such daring hypotheses as: the development of imitation, and thus memes, was the impetus for all of language and for the enlargement of the human brain.

In order to develop meme-theory, Blackmore generalizes the features of genes in a way that might prove to be useful for discussions of how other kinds of replicators function in culture (I’m thinking about digital audio files, filmstrips, etc.). The other majorly cool thing in the book is her suggestion that language develops solely from imitation and the subsequent natural selection of memes. This means that if you wanted to make robots speak, you would just have to outfit them with suitable imitative abilities and a changing environment (although this seems easier than making robots able to “learn” in a general sense, it would still be pretty tough).

That last bit inspired me to try and put together a little sound art piece, which I am currently working on; I’ll post it when I’m done, with a more thorough explanation. (and hopefully a more coherent one as well).

So there, I’m back, and I’ll try to post some things that are more interesting than “what I’m reading now in brief” lists.

I have to admit that when I saw this book in the hands of some guy on the T for the first time, I was really interested in it. I’m a sound guy and avaricious book hoarder, so this seemed right up my alley. I had heard Oliver Sacks on a few podcasts, and he always had interesting brain anecdotes, and I’ve got some free time to kill, so why wait for the paperback version?

The book is divided roughly by type of musical brain abnormality, from people who can’t distinguish pitch, to people who have debilitatingly active perfect pitch, with a consistent pulse of people who were musicians losing their abilities and people who weren’t musicians gaining musical abilities.

And that’s it.

I eventually realized that Oliver Sacks’ nifty stories become rapidly less nifty when he groups them by symptom and relays them one after another. I felt sort of like I was reading from Borges’ infinite library, where every possible book exists, and adjacent copies are only distinguished by additional commas or minorly altered details. As examples taken individually, maybe in the context of an interesting podcast, the stories are great little case studies. Repeat them over and over again, and the people start to fade away, leaving just the bones of the story: the symptoms of whichever disorder the chapter is about.

But maybe that’s the point?

I missed not having any pithy gray text in this one. So here it is.